Digital distractions are designed by Silicon Valley’s smartest engineers to be as addictive as possible.
This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The unprecedented and much publicized upswing of what advocates call “phone-free schools” is good news for anyone who cares about children. Scores of schools around the country now have, or are creating, rules to prevent students’ access to cellphones in classrooms and even throughout the day. Elected officials are crafting policies that will have a broader reach. And there has been a slew of mainstream media coverage of schools pondering or making the switch. The normalization of policies that eliminate, or at least limit, phone use in schools will provide vital relief for millions of kids in thrall to potentially destructive digital distractions, designed by Silicon Valley’s smartest engineers to be as addictive as possible.
The news has even broader implications for advocates like me, who have spent decades building a movement to free kids from exploitation by tech companies and other corporate conglomerates. Almost 25 years ago, I and some colleagues formed the children’s advocacy organization Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay), where I served as founding director from 2000 to 2015. That school districts, cities, and states around the country are finally taking action is one of several signs of progress toward a goal that we were repeatedly told would be impossible to attain.
Advocates and administrators attribute the phone-free school movement’s growth spurt to Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Anxious Generation, which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for months, and lays out an evidence-based argument not just for phone-free schools, but for a phone-free childhood characterized by, among other things, active and creative in-person experiences with friends and family. Haidt points to substantial research linking digital media use, particularly social media, with an alarming rise in adolescents’ serious mental health problems including loneliness, depression, and suicide.
That Haidt is a visible and vocal supporter of banning phones in schools is a huge boon for the movement. At the same time, it’s important to recognize the years of effort by advocacy groups, parents, and teachers that make this moment possible. As Criscillia Benford, chair of Fairplay’s board, told me, “The tinder was laid, and Haidt lit the match.”
Laying tinder is a slog, but it’s essential to any kind of social change. It’s time spent articulating the problem, crafting a mission, raising awareness, honing arguments, building relationships with allies, creating a viable infrastructure, and identifying an organizational ethos. From its onset, Fairplay has maintained its independent voice by not taking funding from tech and media companies, or any corporation.
During my tenure, we did have some notable successes, including forcing Disney to offer refunds on its popular Baby Einstein videos, which the company was falsely marketing as educational for babies. Even at the time, however, we recognized that our primary job was to raise public consciousness, and create a foundation for future activists to build upon. We needed to help people understand that the combination of increasingly sophisticated and seductive technologies with unregulated, child-targeted advertising was a factor in many of the problems facing children. Today’s accomplishments are the fruit of years of work.
THE DANGER SMARTPHONES POSE TO CHILDREN is steadily becoming clearer, thanks to advances in brain science and the study of human development. We now know a great deal about the needs and vulnerabilities of children from infancy through adolescence. While there are vast differences between the capabilities and cognition of a toddler and a teenager, both need repeated, ongoing, positive, face-to-face interactions with other human beings, safe spaces to play, and opportunities to engage actively in learning. And, while a person’s ability to assess risk and potential harms is significantly better at 16 years than at 16 months, the prefrontal cortex, where judgment sits, doesn’t fully develop until we’re in our mid-twenties.
It’s no longer news that, regardless of their age, kids are harmed by the prevailing business model of tech and social media giants like Google, Meta, Snap, Inc., and TikTok’s owner ByteDance. Children of all ages are casualties of the tech industry’s war for our attention, manifest in design features such as personalized advertising, alerts, likes, and autoplay, each designed to keep all of us and our kids glued to our screens. Tech industry whistleblowers like Francis Haugen, the activism of parents mourning children whose deaths are linked to social media use, and reports from advocacy organizations like Fairplay have made this reality undeniable.
Students need opportunities to explore real-life relationships with peers that are unmediated by tech companies.
Even without the documented mental health harms associated with teens’ and preteens’ use of social media and phones, personal digital devices don’t belong in school. Dr. José Lebrón, principal of Kensington High School in Philadelphia, told me that students’ scores on standardized tests began to rise after he instituted a school-wide ban on cellphones nearly ten years ago. His experience echoes results and recommendations from a variety of studies and surveys. In 2023, a report from UNESCO was highly critical of overreliance on phones in schools and rebuked a technology-forward approach to learning. The most recent report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that, around the world, students distracted by phones in schools score significantly lower on the PISA math assessment. Other studies reflect these findings, including one from the London School of Economics showing that the rise in test scores was due to improved performance by students identified as low achievers. I’m not a fan of high-stakes testing, but given its current ubiquity and use as a measure to evaluate student learning, I think these results are a fair indication of the impact of cellphones on school performance.
We might, justifiably, bemoan the state of public education in this country, but there’s mounting evidence that learning suffers when schools allow students to carry around the digital equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a siren song sounding repeatedly in their head to prevent them from thinking. According to a recent survey by Common Sense Media, teens receive a median of over 50 notifications during the school day. No wonder 72 percent of high school teachers see phones as a major problem in the classroom.
It’s notable that Dr. Lebrón’s initial motivation for the ban had less to do with test scores and more to do with safety. He instituted the policy after a student used their phone to plan an assault on a fellow student. While bullying among kids and teens was a problem long before the digital revolution, it’s easier to engage in cyber bullying than doing it face-to-face. Cyber bullying can be anonymous, relentless, publicly humiliating for the victims, and (for the perpetrators) one step removed. Online bullies don’t have to contend with immediately witnessing the terrible pain they inflict. There is plenty of evidence of kids being harmed even to the point of suicide by peers, acquaintances, and strangers using online platforms to inflict emotional and social harm.
It’s important to recognize that simply limiting school phone use isn’t the solution to what is a very serious and pervasive problem. But while eliminating phone use in school won’t eliminate bullying, it will reduce the amount of time available for cyber bullying, and it can make school feel safer for kids.
What phone-free rules won’t do is stop the online bullying that takes place after school. We need to expand our focus beyond phone-free schools to (a) address larger cultural issues (a topic that goes beyond the scope of this article), (b) hold tech companies responsible for harms to children outside of school, and (c) force changes in persuasive design elements employed by app developers and social media companies.
TODAY, IN RESPONSE TO THE EXPLOSION of smart devices, the ubiquity of social media, and the mounting evidence of their harms, Fairplay’s staff has tripled in size and the organization has vastly expanded its reach. One important way Fairplay supports and builds grassroots activism these days is through hosting working groups designed to encourage collaboration among advocates with similar interests. Working groups are organized around areas such as mental health, early childhood, kids and nature, and more.
A few years ago, Sabine Polak, Mileva Repasky, and Kim Whitman met through Fairplay’s Screens in Schools working group and bonded over their concerns about cellphones in school. In 2023, they founded their own nonprofit, the Phone-Free Schools Movement (PFSM), to ensure that schools allow students to “excel academically and develop socially without the pressures and harms of phones and social media during the school day.”
In partnership with Fairplay, one of PFSM’s first projects was to create a tool kit for school administrators. Their “Ambassador Toolkit” will help parents, teachers, and community members to advocate for schools going phone-free throughout the entire school day rather than just in class. Policies that allow students access to phones between classes and during lunch place a terrible burden on teachers, who must use precious class time to collect and redistribute devices. In addition, an all-day policy recognizes that, for their health and well-being, students need opportunities to explore real-life relationships with peers that are unmediated by tech companies.
And that brings me back to laying tinder. Banning phones in schools is an important step to mitigating the harm tech companies foist on children, but it’s not the only step we need to take. Kids are being harmed outside of school as well. Last year, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, issued an advisory warning about the risks that social media can pose for the mental health of children and teens, including body dissatisfaction, depression, and self-harm.
Tech companies won’t voluntarily stop generating persuasive design techniques, even if they know that they harm children. For the first time in decades, however, it’s possible that the government will step in. Two bills that would make children significantly safer online have been introduced in Congress with significant bipartisan support. First, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would, among other protections, require social media platforms to adopt a “duty of care” that will compel them to consider the impact of their product design and operations on children, including whether features such as algorithmic recommendations promote harms such as suicidal behavior, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and others. Second, an update to the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (or COPPA 2.0) would prevent tech companies from collecting personal information such as phone location or web-surfing history from kids under the age of 17, and prohibit individual-specific advertising to children and teens.
Both KOSA and COPPA 2.0 passed the Senate with only three no votes, thanks to the incredibly hard and painful work of parents whose children’s deaths have been linked to social media, in concert with over 200 children’s advocacy groups. The bills are having a harder time passing the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring the bills to a vote. While both bills passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, KOSA was considerably weakened and, if it comes to a vote, it will be a battle to reverse those changes.
Whatever happens under the upcoming Trump administration, there’s more work to do. Huge amounts of money and power have been invested in ensuring that the interests of Big Tech and big business take precedence over what’s best for children. We all know that social justice doesn’t come easy, and, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, constant vigilance is required. Even if all schools ban cellphones, and KOSA and COPPA 2.0 pass in meaningful forms, there’s going to be pushback. And besides, there’s a whole tech and media industry assault on babies and toddlers that neither of these efforts will address.
That said, let’s take a moment to celebrate. From the proliferation of phone-free schools to the Senate’s bipartisan support for KOSA and COPPA 2.0, 2024 has been a terrific year for efforts to disentangle children’s lives from tech industry profit-mongering. And after we take heart, let’s build on that momentum. We owe it to children to keep going.
